Star Wars: Jedi Renegade
by MFMilburn
Summary: The Jedi do not concern themselves with such matters. It's why he left. Halian knows that what seems beneath the Jedi may just be the most important battle the Republic has ever faced, the battle for it's soul. He flees to the most desparate place in the galaxy to try and help those most vulnerable but he soon learns: the past will always find you.


Chapter 1

Halian felt the energy surging through the superstructure. It was too subtle for the other passengers but they hadn't spent their entire lives heightening their senses. Halian didn't need the force to feel the ship move, his Jedi training had honed his senses as much as it had his connection to the force. The hairs on his skin were sensitive enough to feel the air change. The momentum of the ship was shifting. No one noticed but him.

Halian leant back in his seat, careful not to obstruct the walkway behind him. This wasn't the time to accidentally pick a fight with a passer-by. The refugees were scared, often aggressive. People whose lives had been scraped from their bones by the flaying knives of war were unpredictable. Desperation also bred predators. Anyone that didn't keep their head down could be noticed and in a place as dangerous as this, that could be fatal. It was survival of the fittest, where only segments of the ship were under control and the guise of that control often shifted like sand. Halian had spent weeks watching in secret, he couldn't put that carefully laid secrecy at risk. The movement of the ship was a concern though.

The ship had always followed a set course while republic officers battled to process the refugees coming on board. It was futile. For every family processed and sent to a host planet, ten more arrived. Every time a planetary civil war ended; another began somewhere else. The conditions were predictably awful. The ship was old, a retired cargo freighter lacking most amenities. A network of corridors connected enormous cargo bays with only a few other official structures including the bridge and crew quarters. The result was shanty towns filling the cargo bays and built in every other conceivable nook. The smell was always awful, the stink of a thousand species from across the galaxy building up with no sanitation. The air was warm, wet and laden with bacteria, the only saving grace being poor circulation. There was always noise, humming from the engines or just the thrumming of twenty thousand conversations in ten thousand different languages. Even with the crew just barely maintaining control over the ship and its passengers, it always moved predictably. It rarely entered hyperspace, instead slowly drifting around the rim worlds, collecting refugees and supplies as needed.

Law and order here were not Jedi concerns, it was beneath them. As was often the case, the Jedi neglected issues that they had the power to solve overnight. Halian could feel his hackles rising and forced the thought away. Thinking like that always led down the same path. It was the movement of the ship unsettling him and mincing his thoughts.

He reached out for the movement again but it had faded. The ship had levelled on its new course. It had been the slightest change for the briefest moment but it didn't feel right. It wasn't right.

Halian stood and joined the flow of traffic passing down the central walkway in the food hall. It was one of eight. At the moment it was packed to capacity for the midday meal and someone immediately pounced on Halian's seat. Most had given up on a seat, simply walking while they ate or sitting on the ground.

Halian made his way through the crowds to one of the four large exits and followed a series of rusted metal corridors to a darker edge of the ship's warren of pathways. The flooring everywhere in the ship was rusted metal grating. The walls used to be covered in sheet metal but were now stripped bare, revealing the structural skeletons beneath with the sheets used for houses in the cargo bays. Halian was careful of his surroundings, attacks were common. He reached a section of corridor that included a huge beam running alongside it. Halian lay his hand on the beam and closed his eyes. One by one he shut off his senses until every part of his conscious mind was focused on the palm of his hand. Under his fingers was cool metal, slightly moist from the humid air. He reached out further and could feel the etchings on the surface where machines had shaped the beam. Even smaller, he could feel the pinpricks where imperfections on that blade had snagged as it had done its work. Halian focused on the energy that flowed through the beam. Not electrical, physical. The beam vibrated. Halian let the force meet with his hand, felt the vibrations amplified by it and reached with his mind through the metal. He could feel the way the beam vibrated as the engines fired, he could feel thousands of footfalls from people walking along the corridors. He was connected to everything that contacted any part of the ship.

He let his mind go deeper and could feel more. He could feel conversations happening all over the ship. The noises were vibrations in the air that travelled into the metal and then through it to him. He could feel beating hearts, all of the desperation and the pain. He could feel all of the fear. It was overwhelming but he had learned to distance himself from it. At the moment, he was searching for something else.

Halian focused on the ship's outer structure. His mind carried a three-dimensional model and he travelled along it until he had located the outer airlocks. One was occupied by a republic ship that would belong to the immigration officials. Another, at the other end of the ship, was being prepared for an arrival. He tried to reach out past the ship but it was beyond his ability.

The airlock being used connected straight to one of the immense cargo bays. It was used almost entirely for supply drops.

And smugglers. Either the ship was receiving supplies or someone was trying to get something on or off the ship unnoticed.

Halian couldn't ignore the chance that this was related to what he had been searching for. He knew where the ship was about to dock, he would have to hurry if he wanted to be there when it did. He took his hand off the beam and felt his consciousness flood back through his body like a wash of warm water. He stretched his finge…

The world flashed white, then red.

He hit the floor on his knees and tried to blink away the light that had burst in his retinas.

Then the pain shocked through his skull and down his spine. A moment later he realised he had been hit on the back of the head. He spat blood onto the metal grating in front of him and tried to look up.

Something struck him across the face.

The world flashed red again and he rocked back onto his haunches. He was being attacked. He needed to act. He reached out with the force, beyond the hearing of his ears or the sight of his eyes. He sensed three of them, two behind and one in front. One behind was holding something. A weapon. He didn't sense anger or fear, it was clinical. He felt their arm pulling back, a spring being coiled. He sensed it and he waited until…

As the tension was released, he rolled to his side and came to his feet. The weapon, a metal pipe, caught the air. The wielder was off balance, Halian moved. He lifted his leg and kicked at the head. His aim was true. He felt something crack under his heel. He sensed the figure fall away from the present and knew it was done. The other two drew back. His eyes focused but the scene was tinted scarlet, the blow to his face must have drawn blood. He sensed a glimmer of uncertainty and acted. He leapt back from the attackers, pressed his foot against the wall. As he pushed forward again, he drew the force into himself. The energy propelled him faster and harder than any non-force user could have. His elbow collected the second attacker up high. This time his ears caught the sound as something rigid snapped slack.

Halian turned his attention the final assailant. He hadn't moved. Halian sensed calculation, a weighing up of options. This one was far more dangerous than the others.

"Who are you?" Halian asked, not expecting a response, not getting one. The figure withdrew a step into the shadows but not to run. It was obscured though, its face had been covered in shadow, all that Halian could make out was its posture and a deep blue shawl that it wore over the upper half of its body. They stood in stalemate, Halian didn't want to create more of scene than he already had. He'd been spared drawing his lightsaber and needed to keep it that way.

"You's got somewherrrs else to be." The voice was low and steady, Halian pictured a forked tongue hissing the words at him. The attacker was some form of reptilian species then.

More important though was what it meant. Did it somehow know about the docking ship? If so, then how could it be sure that Halian knew? Or was it talking about something else entirely? Or could it even have simply been trying to distract him? Could it possibly sense that he was force trained? Halian couldn't sense a strong connection to the force coming from the attacker but that could be concealed. One thing about the whole muddy mess was certain, this was no random mugging.

"Who are you?" Halian asked again, this time he reached out with the force, drawing a connection between their minds. It taxed him, the pain at the base of his skull flared and he winced. It was all the attacker needed. Like the flash of a laser the thing slipped into the shadow and shot up the wall. Before Halian could catch sight of it again, it was gone into the labyrinth of piping and plumbing. Just like that it was over.

Halian grabbed at the wall behind him for support. He'd shown no weakness but he felt it all over him. The pain in his skull was like a hovercar parked on his head and the gash across his forehead felt deep. Dried blood crusted the right side of his face and he used his sleeve to wipe away what he could. He would need a medic later but the thing had been right, there was somewhere else that he needed to be. He took a few deep breaths to steady his footing and try to quiet the pain in his skull. He had little success but was out of time.

Before Halian left, he searched the other two attackers. Two humans. Neither were dead though one of them might soon be. They were unarmed and had little by way of possessions. He tied them both at the wrists and ankles and then clumsily hid them behind some piping. He tied rags over their mouths, hoping they wouldn't be found before he got back. He swept the floor one final time for any traces and left.

During meal times the corridors were empty enough that Halian maintained a good pace, despite his injuries. The pain in his skull was growing, spreading down his spine like fire. It made his vision blurry. The blood sheeting down over his face didn't help either. He tried to clean it away but it ended up reaching his beard and matting into a red mess. He would need stitches.

He made it to the cargo bay in time to feel the vibrations of a large ship making contact. He looked into the sprawling shanty city in the cavernous space and felt a pang of shame. The suffering of this place was what he was here to relieve and so far, he had done a poor job. It was a slum that had been put together with salvaged scraps, building materials torn from the ship that carried them. Families lived in fear and squalor, waiting for their turn to be processed and in the meantime, being preyed on by criminal gangs and corrupt officials. Even in his battered state with a sheet of blood shrouding his face, Halian looked little worse than many of them. These people didn't live, they just survived.

The floor under Halian's feet rumbled. No-one in the cargo bay took any notice. Halian assumed that illicit deliveries were so common this far from the bridge that they weren't anything special to the refugees that lived there.

Halian had a bad view of the docking area and realised height would be an advantage. He scaled a beam that ran almost to the ceiling of the immense cargo bay. His hands kept slipping in the blood but he leaned into the force to guarantee his path and made it all the way up. Once he was there, he wiped crusted blood out of his eyes and shuffled along a ledge no wider than the palm of his hand. There were grumbles from the refugees that had made their homes up there but none of them caused a scene. Most were species at home higher up and few even bothered using the ledge to cling to. Not generally the sort to start a fight fifty meters above the ground. Halian reached the end of the ledge and perched low on an adjoining beam so he could see directly down to the large, inner airlock. His head was pounding like a blacksmith's hammer now, he started to feel nausea creeping up in his stomach and swallowed it down. He desperately needed focus but was keenly aware that his injuries were likely more substantial than he'd first thought. He cleared his eyes again and looked down at the hatch.

The refugees around the opening were moving away, likely they had learned to keep out of the path of anyone that used it. A few figures coalesced out of the thralls and formed a group to the right of the smaller opening. Each cargo airlock on the ship had a large and a small lock. The large locks were used for bulk goods, shipments of fuel and spice and anything else the ship had carried in its early years. The small locks were for people.

Halian memorised as many details as he could. There were six, three smaller humans and one larger, plus what looked like a Twi-lek and a Gamorean. As the airlock opened, another emerged from the crowd and joined them.

Halian sucked in a breath.

A Trandoshan wearing a dark blue shawl over its shoulders. His acquaintance from minutes earlier.

Halian felt the pounding at the base of his skull intensify. He'd been careful to the point of lunacy to protect his identity and capabilities. He'd barely spoken to anyone about anything, formed no friendships and no-one had ever heard his name. He'd been a shadow in the corner of every room. He'd been so careful.

Now there was this. Not a coincidence, he had been a planned target. It must have had something to do with what he was seeing now but how could it? No-one could have known about his training and there was no official trail for anyone to trace. The importance of what he was watching intensified.

A brief discussion between the group followed when their friend arrived but there was no way to know what they were saying. Halian took in the details of the Trandoshan and committed them to memory. Heavily scarred, most likely a mercenary or bounty hunter. He had a pistol on his hip and…

…Halian felt her before he saw her, sensed her before she even came into view.

The airlock door opened and a single woman appeared.

She emanated a ripple in the force that drew the breath out of his lungs. She was human, tall and athletic with long black hair that was tied back out of her face. She was dressed in military style fatigues with plates of light body armour. She didn't carry any weapons that Halian could see but he could feel her power shuddering through the space between them.

Halian had never felt anything like it, not from the Jedi masters or any other force user he had ever met. Her presence rippled the force as if she might tear right through it. The pain in his skull blossomed, he rolled onto his back and had to bite down on his lip to keep from howling. When he had swallowed down the blood in his mouth and could breathe normally again, he looked back down at the airlock.

She was looking directly at him.


End file.
